If you have an adventure planned that includes a “wine stop” or two along the way, here’s a suggestion, always buy and take home some wine! This may seem like a given, but I’ve continued to be surprised by how few tourists actually purchase wine after a winery visit.
If this is what you do (skip the wine souvenir), then you really don’t know what you’re missing. Realize that we all have been given one of the most precious gifts of all, the ability to call up the most intense memories from a combination of senses, rather than just one. And wine is one of the best ways to reflect on an especially memorable visit to novel and strange places.
So, the next time you are in new locale and run across an interesting bottle shop or winery, be sure to take home a few bottles and write where/when you bought them on the back. Years later, when you open one of those bottles, the memories from the memento will flood back while tasting of the wine and looking at the design of the bottle from that past excursion.
Try it. It works. Just like an old classic song. It takes you back.
Pictured is a bottle of 2011 “Domaine du Vieux Lazaret” Chateauneuf du Pape that was purchased in Regensburg, Germany (one of Tempe’s Sister Cities) in the Fall of 2014. Three years later, it was a pleasure to open this puppy up, reminisce about the shopkeeper inviting us to sample a glass, and telling about making the same trip every year, from Regensburg over to the south of France, to load of his truck with this wonderful cargo. Probably will never get back, but the recollections remain, always.